How fucked-up is Italy?

1. A Cinematic View of Italy as Morally Bankrupt – by ELISABETTA POVOLEDO/NY Times

MILAN — The lunchtime patter of a group of businessmen during the first few frames of “A Casa Nostra” (“In Our House”) neatly encapsulates the mindset of Italian capitalism as envisioned by the director Francesca Comencini. The men chat about food, soccer, insider trading.

The scene sets the tone. “A Casa Nostra” is essentially a film about money, about what it can buy and what people will do to get their hands on it (out of necessity or greed), whether it is selling their bodies, their possessions or their souls.

It is also about Italy today as the director sees it, a cinematic final curtain on the capitalist myth and this country’s transmutation from postwar prosperity to the widespread venality she says has taken root in the national soul.

The indictment, though harsh, takes no sides. “It’s a political film, but not an ideological one,” Ms. Comencini said during an interview in Rome, where she lives. “Today money is at the heart of contemporary Italian culture, and people think that’s normal.”

“But with that comes an inexorable barbarization of everyday life,” she added, and the loss of values that “may be difficult to recover once they’re gone.”

The title also plays on the notion of Cosa Nostra, the name given to the Sicilian Mafia, to convey the sense of a group of criminals plundering the country’s financial and ethical resources.

Italy, she believes, has “misplaced its moral compass.” This is evinced in the film by a kaleidoscopic interplay of story lines that center on the main plot, which involves rigging the financial markets to take over a bank. The story seems lifted straight from the recent front pages of any Italian newspaper.

The movie could have been set anywhere, Ms. Comencini said, but Milan was the “obvious choice for a film about money because it is Italy’s financial capital.”

The choice of setting caused a series of polemics even before the film opened in Italy in early November. Mayor Letizia Moratti of Milan disdainfully dismissed it. “Milan is far more than what Comencini’s film would depict it to be,” she said on a national news television broadcast. “Milan is much more beautiful.” She offered viewers a statistical tour of Milan’s merits: 80,000 people who do volunteer social work; 10,000 tickets a year sold to cultural events; 40 percent of Italy’s scientific patents are developed in this city.

But some people, like the journalist Gianni Barbacetto, the film’s adviser on the intricacies of recent Italian corruption scandals, interpret the criticism as an “act of love for the city by telling things as they are.”

Though reviews have been almost unanimously positive, a smattering of catcalls greeted the movie’s first public screening at the Rome Film Festival last month. These were prompted, suggested Paolo Mereghetti, the film critic for the Milan daily Corriere Della Sera, by “the perplexity of seeing a film that’s out of place in the Italian panorama, far from the facile, flowery and allegorical folklore that seems to be the only language accepted in the cinema and in television, where everything is excessively spelled out, excessively shown off, excessively forced.” After a diet of lighthearted comedies poking fun at the national character, Italians are not used to having their dark side laid bare.

Operatic arias by Verdi are the film’s soundtrack, underscoring the melodramatic counterpoint of intersecting story lines that play off the antagonism between an unscrupulous banker and the police officer trying to unravel his unlawful dealings.

If some of the dialogue seems familiar, that is because it sounds like the transcripts of wiretaps in newspaper accounts of real-life dirty deals and scandals.

“Francesca wanted to decant reality into something that wasn’t a documentary,” said Mr. Barbacetto, who has covered many Italian corruption scandals for Il Diario magazine. “At the same time, she wanted to make a film that went beyond current events.”

A result is the depiction of a society mired in moral ambiguity and selective law abidance. History shows, Ms. Comencini said, that Italians have always had a highhanded relationship with rules and legality and an ambiguous relationship with democracy. But in the past, institutions like the Roman Catholic Church and the strongly ideological political parties in Italy helped keep individual ambitions in check.

“What’s new is the money,” she said. “And, especially during the last 20 years, the idea that it’s O.K. to use power and rules for personal profit.”

A second, equally powerful leitmotif concerns maternity and the inability to procreate, and this too is a direct reference to real life: Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

“Our fertility rate is low because Italy is desperate without knowing it,” Ms. Comencini said. “It is hedonistic, but not happy.” She added, “You have to sense that a moral cradle exists before you go about having children.”

If Italy has a royal family of cinema, Ms. Comencini is part of it. During a career that spanned nearly six decades, her father, Luigi Comencini, directed some of Italy’s most memorable and gentle comedies. Her sister Paola is one of Italy’s best-known screenwriters; another, Cristina, directed a film, “La Bestia Nel Cuore” (“Don’t Tell”), that was nominated for best foreign film at the 2006 Academy Awards.

Never one to shirk from telling a tough tale, Francesca Comencini directed earlier feature films that focused on harassment in the workplace and on the death of a 23-year-old antiglobalization protester at the G-8 summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in 2001. But “A Casa Nostra” exudes a particular sense of urgency, as if Ms. Comencini believed that time was running out for Italian society.

“This is also our house,” said the actress Valeria Golino , who plays the police officer, when confronting the banker with his moral bankruptcy.

But this is no straightforward morality tale. There is no happy ending, only lots of loose ends.

“Italy has lost, but doesn’t know it,” Ms. Comencini said. “That’s why a film like this is necessary, so people can become aware.”

In her mind, however, it may already be too late, “because there are some things that once you lose them, you don’t get them back.”


2. Prime Suspect
So who really is responsible for the mess in Italy?
BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI/Wall Street Journal

ROME--From hidden speakers, a hectoring voice echoes through the narrow streets around Palazzo Montecitorio. Right in front of the parliament, protestors mill around bright blue, and striped green, and red flags--representing disparate interest groups brought together, on this day, by shared grievance. "No more precari" (or risk) in employment, they proclaim, demanding tougher job-protection laws, though Italy's are already some of the most rigid in the world.

Next door, at the 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, soaking in this background noise of Italian political life, sits Romano Prodi, the former president of the European Commission and, for the second time in a decade, Italy's prime minister. Compared with his previous job in rainy and red-taped Brussels, Mr. Prodi ventures that "it's chaotic here, more vital, with a lot of spotty events." (So, Italians can do understatement.)

This is, after all, a man who leads a wobbly nine-party coalition, his days reckoned to be numbered by nearly everyone but him. Rome, rumors say, is swirling with Brutuses plotting his downfall. There are no less than three different communist parties in his camp, each unhappy, each willing to take to the streets at any hint of market-friendliness from their man. Unhappy, too, are the moderates who want to open things up. The hatred for Silvio Berlusconi that forged this center-left coalition and won a narrow victory in April has given way to disenchantment with Mr. Prodi, a 67-year-old former economics professor and state bureaucrat from Bologna.

In sum, Italian politics is back to normal. Mr. Berlusconi--media tycoon, late-blooming politician and womanizer--seduced, scandalized, enthralled and ultimately disappointed Italians by doing little to fix their obvious problems. But he stayed a full five-year term, longer than any other postwar PM. The Prodi era appears to herald a return to revolving-door governments, though the man himself doggedly predicts that he'll be in his job "not only next week, but next year, and the year after next." To him, "gossip is gossip, politics is politics."

Whether Mr. Prodi can last beyond Christmas, no one knows. But can Italy afford such political instability? Of the Continent's big countries, Italy's ailments are by wide consensus the most serious--no mean feat considering the competition from Germany and France. Growth is negligible (though rising from about zero last year); productivity is declining and export markets shrinking; universities spend a third of what America does on each student; Italy's labor pool has the highest share of the unskilled of any OECD country but Mexico; the population is declining and public finances are in disarray. In any scenario for a crisis in the euro zone, Italy plays the lead part. And, oh, throw in a weak (and wasteful) state, entrenched corruption and rising Mafia violence. This mess is now Mr. Prodi's responsibility.

Perhaps Mr. Prodi's favored response--outright denial--is what's necessary to stay sane. Sitting in Mussolini's old office, he says that the economics, the threats to his position, the apparent backtracking on promises to clean up public finances and spur competition, are all nothing much to worry about. "We have taken a lot of decisions," he blurts into the microphone fixed to his lapel. (His aides have hooked us up, as if in a TV studio, to catch his muffled English, accented but fluent. Experience has taught them that a regular old reporter's tape recorder isn't up to the task.) "In five months, there were more decisions concerning the future of this country taken than in the previous five years. [The previous government] took a lot of decisions but restricted [them] to a small number of people, to one person." His eyes smile. The dig is at Mr. Berlusconi, charged in the courts of justice and public opinion with abusing politics to further his business interests; now the head of the opposition, he is a useful bogeyman. So clearly eager is he to get back power, he helps keep the ruling coalition from splitting.

In his first weeks in office, Mr. Prodi was on a bit of a roll, cutting away at privileges long held by pharmacists, lawyers and other coddled cartels. In Italy, a notary collects a fee to approve the sale of a second-hand Vespa and only a druggist can sell aspirin; that's to end. By prying open these professions, Mr. Prodi made most Italians happy, started to shake up a sleepy services sector and showed that left-wing rulers can, by government fiat, force through competition in a country where oligopoly is the natural state. But Mr. Prodi dropped the ball with that most despised of guilds, the taxi drivers, who struck against his plans to free up their sector and got most of their way. "There were seven decisions of liberalization," he says. "I made half a step back in the taxi case. This is true. Sometimes in politics you cannot always succeed in what you do." This is a recurring theme.

Though eager to appear a modernizer abroad--"if you read objectively the newspapers, you'd find more resentment [of me] in the far left than the moderates"--Mr. Prodi has of late appeared to side with the first group. This summer, he blocked a merger between highway operator Austostrade and Spain's Abertis, an action he defends at length on regulatory grounds. Stranger still--and more revealing about the mix of politics and business here--was the Telecom Italia affair. In September, the company's CEO Marco Tronchetti Provera floated a restructuring plan that may have forced a sale of the mobile phone arm, possibly costing jobs but raising much-needed cash. Out of the blue, and during a trip to China, Mr. Prodi released detailed notes of his private conversations with Mr. Tronchetti Provera, revealing confidential information about the group's negotiations with Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner. This remarkable official leak was designed to stop the sale--and succeeded, when a compromised Mr. Tronchetti Provera resigned. To many, this incident stopped reform momentum cold and revealed Mr. Prodi to be an heir to Italy's tradition of Catholic Communism.

In response to this charge, his brow beetles and his eyes close for a few seconds: "This is a complete lie. . . . Which has been the government interference?" In releasing details of his conversation, Mr. Prodi says he was only trying to correct the record about his contacts with Telecom Italia's ex-CEO. "I know that Tronchetti has big influence in Italian media." In Mr. Prodi's view, the press is dominated by enemies. "You will never find one hint of pro-bureaucratic, of pro-state . . .," he says, without finishing the sentence. No one has ever accused him of wielding a silver tongue. "The mantra many papers have is 'Prodi is left, extreme left.' In my coalition, the extreme left is 15%. But this is not my point. My real point is, please find a decision where I have taken an anti-market position."

I bring up next year's draft budget. Having promised tax and expenditures cuts, the government proposed to raise taxes on Italians who earn above  7/840,000 ($51,000). That tax hike--in his words at the time of the decision--would "result in a more just society." The markets panned the budget; ratings agencies downgraded Italy. But powerful unions were happy to see him back down on taxes and spending. Did he capitulate to the hard left? "Absolutely not true" comes the response. He blames Mr. Berlusconi for overspending (fair enough), and says that cuts are deep, and that tax increases are "simply a correction to what was the most unequal distribution of all the big European countries" (which is debatable). To put an upbeat spin on it all, he adds: "If I can grow [the economy] more than 2%, everything will be in perfect order. If not . . ."

In another sign of trouble, organized crime is resurgent in the poor south. Naples has turned into an open battlefield for the Camorra. Critics blame Mr. Prodi's early decision to amnesty thousands of convicts to relieve prison overcrowding. "I should be happy this was the reason," he says. "[There were] 61 murders this time last year [in Naples], 58 this. Of course I am told the rate of murders is higher in New York, but that's not a consolation." The government has talked about sending the army into the city. Mr. Prodi's view is that a poor economy and weak law-enforcement are only secondary causes for the Mafia's staying power in Naples, Sicily and Calabria. The real culprit, he says, is "cultural, cultural, cultural--of course culture means economy, because with this culture you cannot develop." The priority, he says, "is fighting" them head-on with force. "You fight also through new jobs, but it's something you can't get if you haven't cleared an area of criminality."

Mr. Prodi turns relaxed and (by his standards) articulate when the topic turns from problems at home to foreign affairs. Though he ran against Mr. Berlusconi's support for the Iraq war and friendship with George Bush, he has been careful to rein in anti-American excesses. Spain's Zapatero he is not. The Italian withdrawal from Iraq, promised by both sides ahead of April elections, has been orderly. On the war, which he opposed, Mr. Prodi says, "I don't want to say I was right. This is nasty and stupid." He claims a good working relationship on every issue but Iraq with the American president going back to his Brussels days. The Italians took the lead in sending a peacekeeping force to Lebanon, showing up the French, who promised but failed to deliver the troops. This country wants to be taken seriously abroad.

Yet like many in his camp, and true to his CV, Mr. Prodi hitches his foreign policy to Europe. "What is Germany or Italy or France vis-à-vis China, or vis-à-vis the U.S.? Nothing. If we don't stick together, we are lost." But Europe looks lost, after last year's rejection of the constitution, which he calls "a shock." Any more growth in the Union's membership is on hold. So how far will the EU's borders stretch? He takes a long view. "I think that's for the next generation. Europe is Europe and you have limits to this expansion for the foreseeable time and in 50-60 years no one knows what will happen."

Europe today suffers from a crisis of leadership. France, Britain and, though Angela Merkel rules by force of personality, Germany are rudderless. In Italy, the old ruling order collapsed in 1992, amid economic and criminal scandal, and a new class of mostly unprofessional politicians (potentially an asset) moved in, most notably Mr. Berlusconi and the current premier. Unlike the former--Italy's richest man--Mr. Prodi is, in the words of one Italian wag, "the man from nowhere" whose party is small and who doesn't have a natural constituency, much less charisma. Despite these handicaps, he has been a Zelig-like presence at great events in history. In his last stay at the Palazzo Chigi, he twisted enough arms to ensure that Italy's economy qualified for the euro. During an otherwise unremarkable five years in Brussels, the EU opened its doors to the old Warsaw Pact, for which he takes some credit. The mandarins of the left tapped him to challenge Mr. Berlusconi, and in a slight upset he won.

Under his ungainly exterior Mr. Prodi is said to have a tough and, judging by the Telecom Italia episode, vindictive side. He remembers very well that his coalition allies defenestrated him in 1998, and is desperate to avoid a repeat. He indicates that this time coalition weakness may be a strength. "I think you deal better with nine parties [than two]," he says. "You can more easily have the role of mediation, of setting the path, the direction. When you are two there is always the necessity of prevailing." Machiavelli, updated for 2006. Mr. Prodi hears the shouting outside, the criticisms from abroad, and buckles down. "I am blamed by everybody, that is clear, I know that." But he concedes little. There may be no bluster to him, but there is a cold and quiet defiance.

(Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.)